Posts by David Newall 80 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2023
There was a time when everybody had a Skype address. It was the first, last and only choice for most people to call others via their computers. It was just a form of VoIP but incompatible with the relevant IETF standards, so you could only call a Skype user using Skype. I think that's why everyone had a Skype address, and so that was it's true value: it's ubiquitous address book. Then Microsoft bought it. Then they pushed Teams. Then Skype's user-base withered. What an expensive waste. Should have made it compatible with SIP et al.
Would it be so terrible if the world tore up all treaties with the USA and treated them as undesirable? Do they really have anything anybody else wants?
Chips come from Nederland and Taiwan. Manufacturing is China, India and Malaysia. Support services are Philippines, India and Thailand.
Without all of those, especially chips, could they build or launch rockets, train ai, build cars, ...
Let them tariff away, the rest of the world can reciprocate and when the dust has settled, China will have won.
They're a crazy, stupid people who prefer a narcissist, blowhard, lying, deceitful, bullying cont who flouts all law and convention for their president rather then anybody else.
A colleague browbeat me into trying o1 on a web development project. Not a single one of its answers was correct, but it did give the kernel of a useful solution which, through additional reading and experimentation, resulted in a very good solution. I'm sure it would have taken me much longer to get there without o1.
The takeaway for me is that it one treats everything it says with utmost suspicion and checks it carefully, it most certainly can help an experienced practitioner arrive at good solutions. Take nothing it says at face value or you'll end up looking like a fool; which would be well deserved.
I worked for a Japanese office equipment company and was debugging a word-processor when one of the Japanese managers walked by. I was reading the source code out aloud (doesn't everyone?) when he asked me where I learned Japanese. Funny how he immediately understood the purpose of a variable but I had to pour over the source code.
Edge computing is a fine idea and I support it wholeheartedly. The problem with it is that bandwidth is thin at the edge, power is unreliable, environment runs hot and dusty, and the hardware lacks error correction. Not always, of course, but, say, 99.99% of it.
Social networks could be engineered to allow the data to keep appearing and disappearing, but, my god that would be hard. What they can't do is analyse and aggregate petabytes of data across thin, highly contested links.
There's a reason Google and Facebook have bigger and better networks than AT&T, CenturyLink and Verizon, and more computer power than IBM and Microsoft. It's because they can't operate any other way.
I lament that it's so.
"hired by the multi-tenant building owner who was worried about the inhabitants being "a little too relaxed" about office security"
I feel as if this is not appropriate. Heart in the right place, but he was conspiring to break in to offices that weren't his, and that's not okay.
I'm endlessly fascinated by old kit.
CSIRAC, the oldest complete first generation digital computer, is on display in Melbourne's Sciencework museum, and I'm sorry to say it's such a disappointment. I first saw the machine in the Melbourne museum, where also was displayed a filmed oral history, from his hospital bed, by one of the inventors; sorry, I forget which one and can't find the film on the Web.
The exhibit at Melbourne museum was awe inspiring. You could walk around and through it. You could see the mercury storage tubes, a magnetic drum and disk, and, well, all of it.
Alas, at the exhibit at Sciencework is very disappointing. Many of the goodies, including meet tubes, drum and disk, are hidden against a wall, and they've added some ghastly light sequence to flash lights on a control panel. No doubt that hints at what it looked like in operation, but I don't like it. It cheapens what is one of the most important, if not the most important, historical computer exhibits in the world.
None the less, it's a thrill to stand in the presence of this artifact.
I'm concerned about hordes of them pulling over to the side of the sky while they wait for a repair truck; long queues, waiting for lights to change in the skyways; sky rage; and particularly, the energy required to lift a couple of tonnes of vehicle into the sky, only to throw it away on the downward trip.
With io domain being bought by funnull, and shenanigans about where they are based, is it polyfill.io who's doing something nefarious or funnull? Certainly if the io domain is running amok, polyfill.io might be blameless.
Also, at 0136 UTC, polyfill.com does not resolve. The article implies it should.
It's depressing, but I've come to accept that we're in the first stage of war. Adversaries of freedom are attacking their neighbours, the leaders of freedom are trying to appease but are being dragged into overt action, which will escalate into full blown hostility.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Russia, but also North Korea, Palestine and Israel, and a slightly circumspect China who is eyeing Taiwan and a lot of the rest of SE Asia. Germany and USA are lurching to the right, NATO may fracture, a criminal will probably sit in the Whitehouse, and I despair at where it ends.
Nowhere good.
Users can be really stupid, and I don't mean willfully. They can genuinely not see our understand the obvious.
I took a support call once, I don't remember what the issue was but the lady could not seem to navigate through the menus. Even 0 enter 0 enter 0 enter failed to get her to the main menu. The screen stayed the same. In desperation, I asked her to press the secret, magic debug key combination. She said it was still the same. But, when asked if the screen now displayed "Debug: H)ex edit, F)iles" and so on, she allowed that it did. In fact, that was the only thing displayed, and she had never used the magic debug key before, so, in her mind, "same as before" meant "wonder-filled and different".
I can't remember if I hung up on her or kept helping. I'd like to say it was the latter but I've got such little patience for fools that I probably did hang up on her. At least I didn't swear.
I had a similar experience with a machine provided by a digital company somewhere Pacific. They provided it with 20 HDDs, which I was happy with because I could increase redundancy. Unfortunately, as I discovered sex months later, when I looked closely after a disk failed, the hardware was all 10 years old. I wanted them to replace all the drives with new, but they would only replace one with a cheery offer to replace more as and if they failed. They put it another years-old drive Six months later, 5 more died on the same night. ZFS so it managed, but I told them I reserved the right to reject replacements that were too old. During the excessive time that it took them to find more, all of the rest of the drives failed. ZFS is good but it's not miraculous, so, having lost all of my data, I transferred all five of my servers to their competitors and cancelled my account. The replacement ZFS server was also not new but the SSDs they installed were.
I wonder about equal pressure. HDDs have a maximum altitude, above which the air pressure is too low to hold the head off the platter. The drive needs to be specially sealed to operate in high altitudes.
If pressure is much higher than expected, what would that do? Would it increase the gap between head and platter? Would it damage the motors?
I note that manufacturers specify a low-bound for the drives. It's around -50m.
In the good times, web pages were tiny. Images would be measured in low kilobytes and total load time in tenths of a second. Now, it's common to load multiple images into carousels, each being tens of megabytes, and JavaScript nonsense libraries which are just as big. Load times takes many seconds, even tens of seconds.
I value my bandwidth, as well as my time, and I'll be dammed if I let advertisers steal either.
It's not only ads that bloat webpages, but they are a main contributor. I hardly ever see ads because I use NoScript (why would anybody run programs served by unknown and unwanted third and fourth parties?) and my load times are generally sub-second. Plus, I sometimes see interstitial gaps where the ads don't appear.
Even if we could get to light speed, which seems incredibly unlikely, that still makes the trip to our closest neighbour more than 4 years. We're over 620 light years from Betelgeuse and 28,000 light years from galactic centre.
Space is big, really big, and even at light speed, we're going nowhere.
Didn't everybody predict exactly this outcome? Denying China access to US technology was merely a stumbling block for them. Soon they'll have developed their own technology that's cheaper, faster, smaller and uses less power, and they'll be the supplier of choice except for companies under the US government's thumb. USA forced China into their soon-to-be enviable position. I think that's called karma.
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